The new Nvidia GeForce 378.78 driver is out, and Nvidia is making some rather bold claims with this driver. DirectX 12 performance should have been increased big-time, this is the promised driver you guys have been hearing about. We have been testing with this driver for our GeForce GTX 1080 Ti review for a couple of days now and indeed noticed a perf increase for Hitman as well as Doom.

Hence in our review we updated all cards for these two benchmarks already in the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti review. Nvidia however makes the bold statement that average performance gains across all titles would be roughly 16%. NVIDIA states 33% on Tomb Raider; 16% on Hitman; Gears of War 4 sees a boost of 10%; Ashes of the Singularity makes do with 9%; and Tom Clancy’s The Division would get a 4% increase. Now Nvidia is comparing to the 1080 release driver (368.xx series from May last year), which we feel would not exactly be the right measure point. Let's compare to the previous WHQL driver 378.66.

GeForce GTX 1080 @ WQHD

GeForce 378.66

GeForce 378.78

Difference %

Deus Ex : Mankind Divided

69

70

1,43%

Hitman (2016)

92

104

11,54%

Rise of the Tomb Raider

93

94

1,06%

Gears of War 4

95

94

-1,06%

Ashes of the Singularity

86

88

2,27%

Sniper Elite 4

89

89

0,00%

Battlefield 1

95

96

1,04%

The Division

72

75

4,00%

% difference = 100 - (x/y * 100)

We just grabbed these titles and put that to the test, the reality is that only Hitman makes a substantial enough difference in our testing. The Division indeed also sees a 4% increase in performance. Ashes also sees a bit of an increase, the rest remains within normal anomaly differences. We do have to state that we are using a fast clocked (8 cores @ 4.3 GHz) 16 thread processors (5960X) this might hinder the threading performance that DX12 optimizes so much, Have a peek at our results. We test at our standard quality settings used in all our graphics benchmark, we also test at the audience preferred resolution of 2560x1440 which you could argue a bit.

3Dmark Time Spy

Score

GPU

CPU

GeForce 378.66 WHQL

7446

7181

9415

GeForce 378.78 WHQL

7521

7250

9550

3DMark Time Spy, testing the GeForce GTX 1080 in-between the two driver does yield into a better score. However the differential sticks are give or take 1% again, the limited perf increase might very well have to do with the fact that we use a spicy tweaked processor. That also always has been the reason that we use such hig-end platforms, as we do not want the processor to bottleneck the GPU. Hence we try to get rid of the system being CPU bound, which is exactly where DX12 normally tries to help out. Well, just sayin'

Exactly. The more CPU bottlenecked, the better. That is the whole point of dx12 in the first place.

No, that is not the point of DirectX 12 at all. DirectX 12 doesn't magically reduce CPU bottlenecks, but all it does is help to utilize CPUs better by allowing it to make use of the GPU more efficiently compared to DirectX 11. This is an oversimplification and there are variables involved.

The aforementioned image you see in my post above is from nvidia's site where they themselves used a Core i7 5930K and obtained those numbers at 4K.

From the looks of nvidia's claims, the roughly 16% gains across numerous titles are found at 4K, compared to the initial launch driver performance.

I have a GTX 770 4GB and I didn't see any noticeable improvements in Deus EX Mankind Divided or Far Cry Primal. I don't have Rise Of The Tomb Raider installed right now. Guess I probably am not applicable for the boost either since my card is of an older architecture. Guess that's a different tale.

Frankly speaking, the claims for 16% increase across the titles is BS. They improved in Hitman, Rise Of The Tomb Raider and The Division. Anything else "compared to the GTX 1080 launch driver" is a big lie, as you may have noticed I pointed out in a previous post that some of the games they are noting didn't have a DirectX 12 executable at the time of the GTX 1080 launch.

Yxskaft
Senior Member

Posts: 1234
Joined: 2011-02-17

#5404743 Posted on: 03/10/2017 11:09 AM
The Nvidia comparison is very misleading, you could argue that it's there in the smallprint but I have to question the morality of making such headline claims.

As for DX12 comparisons on a bottlenecked cpu, I can see the reasoning for some people wanting this and the results would be interesting. Although to be fair to Hilbert, most posters on the threads I read do not seem fall into that category.

Just looking at the posts in this thread, alot have Sandy Bridge, which is six years old at this point.
For myself, I also have Phenom II X4 and Core 2 Quad systems, for which a DX12 path could be a game-changer

Even a highly overclocked i5 2500k is showing its age today

RealNC
Senior Member

Posts: 2786
Joined: 2011-11-24

#5404763 Posted on: 03/10/2017 11:48 AM

No, that is not the point of DirectX 12 at all. DirectX 12 doesn't magically reduce CPU bottlenecks, but all it does is help to utilize CPUs better by allowing it to make use of the GPU more efficiently compared to DirectX 11.

Yeah. In other words, it magically reduces CPU bottlenecks.

This benefits slower CPUs much more.

Silva
Senior Member

Posts: 817
Joined: 2013-06-04

#5404765 Posted on: 03/10/2017 11:50 AM

Well that explains everything. I have to say this is not what I would expect from a professional site like guru3d. Obviously the results are going to be better on more cpu limited setups.

I don't understand what you mean, using a 1000USD CPU is unprofessional? Get a life.

AlmondMan
Senior Member

Posts: 436
Joined: 2007-09-03

#5404772 Posted on: 03/10/2017 12:07 PM
Probably the same as AMD's claims of performance increases. All from the games being patched, very little from drivers.

I figure there'll be no real difference between the first driver and this one when run on fully patched games.

It would be interesting to limit the CPU to 4 cores only, as the i5 is likely the most common baseline CPU.

A bottleneck is when your GPU is stalling due to it waiting on the CPU to process queues.

A CPU that utilizes the GPU above 99% the majority of the time can still see gains going from DirectX 11 to DirectX 12 simply because it can send commands to GPU to get more work done in parallel at the same time, and still have the same GPU usage.

Games like Gears Of War 4 sees performance scaling beyond 4 cores.

It's probably the only game I have seen in a long time that also made use of the Hyperthreading.

The minimum framerate on a 6500K at 4.5 GHz can't even touch a 6700 locked SKU in terms of performance thanks to the CPU and it's threads being utilized properly.

#5404869 Posted on: 03/10/2017 03:30 PM
So Hitman's DX12 has been optimised in this driver but everything else is within margin of error?

Can't say I am surprised as DX12 has been one disappoint after another since it launched for me but it's still disappointing that this new(-ish) API still offers no real performance boost in the majority of games or graphical features over DX11. It's like it exists just to sell Windows 10 (via exclusive DX12 Store games) and to benefit weak console hardware like the Xbox One...

Agonist
Senior Member

Posts: 2695
Joined: 2008-10-13

#5404879 Posted on: 03/10/2017 03:49 PM
So Hitman's DX12 has been optimised in this driver but everything else is within margin of error?

Can't say I am surprised as DX12 has been one disappoint after another since it launched for me but it's still disappointing that this new(-ish) API still offers no real performance boost in the majority of games or graphical features over DX11. It's like it exists just to sell Windows 10 (via exclusive DX12 Store games) and to benefit weak console hardware like the Xbox One...

DX11 launch games were the same. Alot of them only had DX11 api path just for having AA with deferred lighting. After about a year of DX11 games they really started to shine.

Sadly it will take time but I think DX12 will be around a long time. We are 7 years into DX11 titles now.

I didnt expect anything mind blowing graphics wise from games. And honestly didnt expect them to run better either.

DX11 didnt really run better then DX10 or DX9 games. Infact most of the time DX9 ran better because of less graphics features being used.

Redemption80
Senior Member

Posts: 18089
Joined: 2009-01-06

#5404904 Posted on: 03/10/2017 04:29 PM
Hitman is the only game that performs poorly on Nvidia hardware, everything else is probably as good as it can get.

DX12/Vulkan are still in the beta stages, and not hugely exciting for Nvidia owners, but AMD owners get the have more fun with it though.

The higher the calls number less driver/ api bottlenecks, potentially making richer worlds and more interaction with it. And that's what 3dmark api overhead benchmark shows. But in reality it doesn't deliver, now idk why but I think its mostly because of excessive postprocess fx crippling gpu pipeline.

The higher the calls number less driver/ api bottlenecks, potentially making richer worlds and more interaction with it. And that's what 3dmark api overhead benchmark shows. But in reality it doesn't deliver, now idk why but I think its mostly because of excessive postprocess fx crippling gpu pipeline.

If all that was made in optimization in mind it would be a lot different, but hey you gotta make fx to cripple gpu to sell new ones.. hypocrite development at best.

I mean all those techniques enhance the image quality.. what would you rather them do? Just increase polygon count to 500 billion? Let framerates go up to 10,000 fps?

And I know you're probably going to respond with "improve lighting with raytracing" or some nonsense, which is completely outside the realm of current generation performance. All the HBAO/GI/HFTS techniques you're describing as "fx to cripple GPU" are all optimized systems designed to replicate raytracing and in some cases implement raytracing techniques.

There has also been giant strides in material shaders and stuff too - things like photogrammetry significantly improve the look of materials with very little performance impact.

So really not sure what else you'd want them to do.

Phragmeister
Senior Member

Posts: 1574
Joined: 2010-01-25

#5404944 Posted on: 03/10/2017 05:54 PM
I wonder how many people are gonna' be suckered into getting Windows 10 over this.